Democrats

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Andrew Cuomo: Dared question the orthodoxy that has wrecked countless businesses and lives | AIER

andrewcuomoEditor’s Note: The following is really two articles rolled up into one. The first about inserting Andrew Cuomo into the Democratic National Convention as a candidate; the second about the economic blunder of shutting everything down.

By Jeffrey A. Tucker

Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, is moving up in the betting odds for getting the Democratic presidential nomination, even though he is not running. The reason is that binge-watching newshounds have noticed something about his comportment during this crisis. He seems just slightly struggling to know what’s true. Sometimes he is even honest.

Consider this. On Thursday March 26, Cuomo dared question the orthodoxy that has wrecked countless businesses and lives. He revealed what actual experts are saying quietly all over the world but had yet not been discussed openly in the endless public-relations spin broadcast all day and night.

He said the following:

“If you rethought that or had time to analyze that public health strategy, I don’t know that you would say quarantine everyone. I don’t even know that that was the best public health policy. Young people then quarantined with older people was probably not the best public health strategy because the younger people could have been exposing the older people to an infection. “

Further:

“What we did was we closed everything down. That was our public health strategy. Just close everything, all businesses, old workers, young people, old people, short people, tall people. Every school closed, everything.”

It’s true that anyone following the unfolding fiasco and the gradually emerging data behind it knows that Cuomo is right. The response has not been modern and scientific. It has been medieval and mystical. The theory behind the policy has been nothing but a panicked cry of run and hide before the noxious gas gets you. Lacking reliable data – which is the fault of the CDC and FDA – we replaced knowledge with power.

In the end, this fiasco is an epistemic crisis. As Ed Yong has written in a beautifully detailed article for The Atlantic, “The testing fiasco was the original sin of America’s pandemic failure, the single flaw that undermined every other countermeasure.” Even the wide acceptance of social distancing as a norm, however much it helps curb the spread, presumes this absence of knowledge. Stay away from everyone as much as possible: a slogan that reveals how little we know.

And yet lacking that knowledge, the politicians, cheered on by the media, acted in ways that have fundamentally wrecked life as we knew it, all in the course of a couple of weeks.

The massive knowledge gap was filled by a cascade of predictive models made possible by modern statistical packages readily available by subscription to any member of the clerisy. If this, and this, and this, and if this and this and this, then ENTER. Out pops what appears to be a precise presentation of our future under the following conditions, along with an overlay of embedded cause-and-effect assumptions about certain policies followed or not followed. Day after day we were bombarded with such predictions, and we paid close attention because we had little in the way of actual on-the-ground facts that have been available to us in previous disease panics.

It then became the perfect storm. Risk-averse politicians deciding to do something, anything, to avoid blame. Bureaucrats doing what they do best, which is telling people no, you cannot innovate, you cannot produce, you cannot distribute. Local tyrants stopping price gouging and therefore preventing the price system from working. A howling media famished for eyeballs, ears, and clicks. A public panicked about disease and death. An egregious dividing of people into essential and nonessential. Policy snares, tangles, missed opportunities all around.

The cacophony of information chaos has been palpable, unbearable.

All the while, a few knowledgeable experts have been trying their best to weigh in and get some slight attention for rationality. My heart, in particular, goes out to the esteemed Professor John Ioannidis who has been exposing fake science based on bad data his entire life and has been previously celebrated for doing so. He writes as often as he can, while still trying to be as precise and accurate as he can. Apparently such high-end people have a private email list in which they share observations and data, while doing their best to bring calm while civilization is falling apart.

His first salvo appeared March 17. God bless The National Post for publishing Ioannidis’s latest exasperated piece.

At the moment, we are enacting extremely severe measures in an effort to do something. However, we have very little evidence-based data on how to guide our next steps. We really don’t know where we are, where we are heading, whether our measures are effective, or if we need to modify them. There is a possibility that many of our aggressive measures could be doing more harm than good, especially if they are to be maintained in the long term. There will be major consequences in terms of lives lost, major disruptions to the economy, to the society, and to our civilization.

At this juncture we need to act swiftly. At the same time, we need to act equally swiftly to collect unbiased data that will tell us how many people are infected, the chances that someone who is infected will have a serious outcome and die, how the epidemic is evolving in different settings and places around the world, and what difference we are making with the measures that we’re taking. This information can make a huge difference and there is a lot that can go wrong if we don’t have the right data.

This has been an acute situation. At the same time, collecting reliable data should not take time and should not halt our decision-making process. Getting information on representative samples of the population is very easy. It has been done in Iceland, where they have a cohort covering most of the national population looking at samples that have been provided. They see that they have an infection rate of 1.0 per cent, and up until now only two people have died. So, out of the 3,500 infected people in Iceland there have been two deaths, which corresponds to an infection fatality rate lower than the common flu. Of course, some people may be infected later, but nevertheless, these estimates would be very different compared with the original claims of case fatality rates of 3.4 per cent that were circulated.

At the same time, we have other pieces of evidence that the number of people who are infected is much larger compared with the number of cases we have documented. In most places, with few exceptions around the world, we are just testing people who have substantial symptoms who have come to seek health care or even to be hospitalized. These are just the tip of the iceberg. The Iceland experience and other data from Rome and Italy where entire city populations were tested shows that the vast majority of people are either completely asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic in ways that you would not be able to differentiate from the common cold or common flu. This information makes a huge difference while we are proceeding with aggressive measures of social distancing and lockdowns that may have tremendous repercussions, especially in the long term.

As the song says, stop making sense.

I write on Saturday morning March 28, and right now there are two contrary strains about to collide. On the one hand, you have scientists reducing their death-rate predictions further and further, lopping off zeros by the day. On the other hand, this is accompanied by appalling levels of despotism, even to the point of National Guard checkpoints at state borders and restrictionson what you can buy even at “essential” stores. This gigantic gap between emerging professional medical consensus and appalling policy ignorance is revealing as never before the practical impossibility of scientific public policy.

Then you have the cascade of unintentional and unexpected outcomes of the rush to coerce. It began with Trump’s disastrous block on flights from Europe that sent millions scrambling for tickets and led to an unspeakable crush of people standing shoulder-to-shoulder at our nations’ airports, contradicting the demand that people social distance just when the virus was revealing itself as highly contagious. The very opposite of intended results!

That’s just the beginning. I doubt seriously that the political class in this country, as low a regard I have it, set out to destroy all that we call civilized life, instantly generating millions of unemployed workers and bankrupt businesses all around, not to mention a pandemic of utter hopelessness on the part of vast swaths of the world’s population. Still, this is what they have managed to achieve. This is what their pretense of knowledge – as opposed to actual wisdom – has unleashed on the world, with incalculable human cost.

As for economics, are we talking recession? Depression? Those words indicate cyclical changes in business conditions. My friend Gene Epstein suggests another term for what we are going through. The Great Suppression. There will be months, years, and decades in which to more clearly observe the countless ways in which the supressors piled error upon error, blockage upon blockage, to add to the grotesquery.

What truly should inspire us all right now are the grocers, pharmacists, truck drivers, manufacturers, doctors and nurses, construction workers, service station attendants, webmasters, volunteers of all sorts, philanthropists, and specialists in a huge variety of essential professions who keep life functioning more or less. And let us not forget the “unessential” people (it’s an incorrect and vicious term) who have innovated ways around the Great Suppression to continue to serve others, keep the rent being paid, and food on their tables. They are the means of salvation out of this mess.

The market, hobbled and bludgeoned, still loves you.

As for the politicians, Andrew Cuomo has admitted some of the error. In a much-welcome change, he has even deregulated medical services. There’s just a hint of humility and humanity embedded in these statements and actions. We need more of that, vastly more, if only to contribute to calming things down long enough to gain some perspective, and, hopefully, some eventual realization that in the “land of the free and the home of the brave” a virus should be regarded as a disease to mitigate and cure, not an excuse to bludgeon life on earth as we know it.

Source: American Institute for Economic Research

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Italians Take to the Streets to Protest New Mandatory Vaccination Law | Vaccine Impact

Vaccine-protests-ItalyBrian Shilhavy
Health Impact News Editor

Readers from Italy have been contacting Health Impact News this past week (June, 2017), asking us to cover the massive demonstrations happening throughout Italy to protest a new mandatory vaccine law. This news has been censored from the U.S. corporate media.

Francesca Alesse, who worked with the VAXXED film team to get the film shown in Italy last year, writes:

In an unprecedented way, the decree-law proposed by the Minister of Health has been signed by the sitting Italian president Sergio Mattarella. Only four vaccines were mandatory in Italy, now that number triples to 12.

No other decree-law has moved so fast in the Italian legislative system, the reasons of such hurry are incomprehensible considering that the Istituto Superiore Di Sanità (the local version of the CDC) has declared that contrary to what stated in the decree itself there is no objective urgency. There are no epidemics, the number of cases of measles or meningitis in the current year have been substantially lower than the previous year.

Thousands of parents have protested the new law this past June 3rd,  protests and marches have taken place in 21 Italian cities spread across the nation. A national protest is scheduled for this Sunday June 11th.

The translated full text of the decree-law is found here.

Florence Protest

The new law apparently has severe consequences for parents who fail to comply, including the possibility of having their children taken away from them. In addition to public outcry, there appears to be strong political opposition to the law as well.

Elisabetta Bressan, an Italian commenting on Facebook writes:

Protests are going to increase here, as our Government has announced…  a law to introduce 12 mandatory vaccines. The law…. was announced by our Health Ministry to be as follows: 12 mandatory vaccination needed to have access to pre-school system (age 0-6): no vaccination, no enrollment, no exceptions; for mandatory school (age 0-16) if kids were not vaccinated parents should pay a penalty between 500€ and 7.500€ per year, if you cannot afford it, you’ll be refer to Jouvanile Court, that could suspend your parents rights to get your children vaccinated. A national protest is envisaged in Rome on June 11.

This will start within the next school year (September 2017); it has been calculated that more then 800,000 kids will need to receive a massive vaccination in a very little time.

As you know, Italy had been chosen in 2014 as leading Country for the WHO world vaccination campaign co-financed by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, therefore what happen here can affect also other countries.

In other comments posted on Facebook, Elisabetta Bressan suggests that the new mandatory vaccine law has strong financial connections to the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, which could benefit from over 1 billion euros invested in Italy over the next four years. She writes:

This is the press conference of Health Minister, Ms. Lorenzin explaining the DL https://www.facebook.com/mauriziolupi.it/videos/10155541295653694/

At the opening of the conference, all guests are presented to the press, including Dr. Ranieri Guerra, presented as Director General of Health Prevention of the Ministry of Health. (Man sitting on Ms. Lorenzin right)

His curriculum vitae is regularly published in the Government’s website:
http://www.salute.gov.it/…/CV…/CV_pubblicazioni_Guerra_n.pdf at page 6 you can see he is a member of Glaxo Smith-Kline Foundation board.

On the Foundation website http://www.fsk.it/la-fondazione/storia-della-fondazione/ you are provided with additional information:

In 1987, it was recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the ‘Center for Collaboration in the Training of Health Personnel’ and in 1997 as a ‘Hospitality Management Collaboration Center’ in Italy.

The Fsk.it website belongs To Smith Kline Foundation which is maintained thanks to the non-binding annual liberal loan of the founding partner GLAXOSMITHKLINE SpA, as well as the incomes of its own projects.

The members of the Board of Directors, as indicated here, are nominated by the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of University and Research, the Ministry of the Economy, ISS, the State State Conference and GlaxoSmithKline SpA and they approve the FSK Activity Plan annually.

The members of the Board of Directors (including Mr. Ranieri Guerra) are appointed, among others, by:
– Ministry of Health, represented in the press conference by Minister Beatrice Lorenzin
– ISS,
– Higher Institute of Health, present in the person of Dr. Walter Ricciardi,
– the same GlaxoSmithKline S.p.A. Vaccines and drugs, Glaxo bets 1 billion on Italy
http://www.sanita24.ilsole24ore.com/…/vaccini-e-farmaci-gla…

Here we talk about an investment of 1 billion euros in Italy for the next 4 years, including 2016 and the years relating to the new National Vaccine Plan 2017/2019 so promoted by the Ministry of Health.

Source: Vaccine Impact

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California’s shutdown orders are totally unconstitutional | WND

FreedomJohnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: Libertarians, as you can see from the Foundation for Economic Education’s annual freedom ranking of the fifty U.S. states, California ranks near the bottom with Hawaii and New York. Perhaps this correlates with the draconian lockdown orders coming from each of these states during the COVID-19 crisis. 

By Jim Breslo

President Donald Trump is rightly talking about when we can reopen the country for business, noting that we cannot allow the cure to become worse than the disease. However, Trump does not have the keys to the shop. It is the country’s governors and mayors. Thus far they have not been expressing the same sentiment. If they do not loosen their shutdown orders within a reasonable time, we may have to turn to the courts. It turns out that many, if not all, of these orders would likely be struck down as unconstitutional.

The federal government thus far has only issued “guidelines,” not enforceable orders. Many states and cities, however, have issued enforceable orders whereby violation subjects one to fines or imprisonment.

Mark Meuser is a constitutional law attorney and former Republican nominee for California secretary of state. He reported this week on my Hidden Truth Show podcastthat the California Constitution does not permit state officials to order every resident, regardless of their individual health condition, to “self-quarantine” or “shelter in place.”

Article I of the California Constitution reads: “All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy.” Most state constitutions contain similar language.

Neither the governor nor the mayors have the authority to suspend the state constitution, regardless of the emergency. According to Meuser, state officials may declare a state of emergency, and may quarantine individuals known to have the virus or known to have been in contact with those who had the virus pursuant to the state’s health and safety laws. But a sweeping ban prohibiting people from leaving their homes, according to Meuser, is a clear overreach. It arguably violates numerous parts of Article I, such as Californians’ “inalienable right” to be “free and independent,” enjoy “life” and “liberty,” to “acquire, possess, and protect property,” and pursue “happiness.”

California’s Appellate Court ruled on a case brought soon after the time of the Spanish Flu, stating, “A mere suspicion [that someone is infected], unsupported by facts giving rise to reasonable or probable cause, will not justify depriving a person of his liberty under an order of quarantine.” [Ex parte Arata (App. 2 Dist. 1921) 52 Cal.App. 380, 198 P. 814.]

Granted, the case involved imposing a quarantine on a single individual, not on the entire populace. But, think of it this way: If state or local officials required that just you stay home, even though you do not have the flu and have not been in contact with someone known to have the flu, your reaction would likely be, “You can’t do that!” Well, the directive is no more constitutional if it applies to everyone like you. It may seem more “fair,” and not violate the equal protection clause, but it would still equally violate individual liberty. A government violation of individual constitutional rights does not become less violative simply by applying it to more people.

Meuser argues in the interview that the orders are also a clear violation of the constitutional right to “protect property” since Californians are being prevented from tending to their property unless it happens to be deemed “essential.” If a Californian cannot visit, let alone operate, one’s business, it cannot be protected.

Mayor Eric Garcetti’s order requires “all residents of the City of Los Angeles to stay inside their residences.” The order expressly prohibits, “Travel to or from a vacation home outside the City.” In other words, Angelenos are prohibited from going to their own garage, getting in their own car and driving it to their own vacation home. Such conduct, according to the order, is punishable by “fine or imprisonment.”

The orders may also violate the United States Constitution. The First Amendment prohibits both state and federal government from “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion or “the right of the people peaceably to assemble.” Clearly, the orders prevent people from engaging in religious gatherings or joining in any group activity. Since the bans are not narrowly tailored to those with the virus or known to have been subjected to it, they likely violate the First Amendment. Further, the orders violate at least the intent of the Fifth Amendment, which provides, “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” Shutting down businesses for the public good arguably requires the state to provide compensation to those businesses.

It is certainly up for debate whether shutdown orders in California, New York and other states is the smart thing to do. It seems that about half of people support them, and half do not. They are wreaking economic havoc on businesses and employees, while at the same time no doubt slowing the spread of the virus. Only with time will we be able to know whether the trade-off was worth it. We make similar trade-offs between freedom and health all the time. The most obvious example being the choice to allow people to drive automobiles despite the fact that they cause about 40,000 deaths every year in the U.S. Importantly, the coronavirus has killed far less than that worldwide, yet we are restricting people to their homes, a far more restrictive measure than prohibiting people from driving.

But whether the trade-off is smart or not, it is irrelevant to the question of whether it is constitutional. The orders clearly are not. State and federal constitutions provide a vital backstop to protect the people against government overreach, which often comes at times of crisis. We saw this happen after 9/11. It is human nature to panic and to overreact out of fear. The Constitution, which we all swear an oath to by nature of being citizens, stands on guard to protect us against such overreach in times like this. This is not the time to abandon it.

Source: WND

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When did coronavirus begin in the US? And why it matters | Conservative Review

c1ad1e30-covid-19-ugh-sizedBy Daniel Horowitz

The entire political focus of yesterday’s news cycle was the legislative imbroglio between Republicans and Democrats over the coronavirus rescue package. Republicans believe we should presuppose and even continue encouraging an indefinite shutdown while spending trillions to treat it. Democrats believe the same thing and also want to add all their other extraneous progressive policies too. But nobody is asking: Do we really need to intensify the shutdown before we understand the data and projections of the actual virus itself?

Given that the virus was discovered in Wuhan on November 17 (at the latest), when did coronavirus really begin in this country? Roughly how many cases do we think occurred before we began testing during the first week in March, and how many fatalities occurred? How many of the presumed flu deaths, and particularly the presumed pneumonia deaths during what was thought of as a bad flu season, were really due to coronavirus?

These are not mere academic questions. They should determine our public policy response. Knowing when the virus began and what we think occurred in January and February (and perhaps even December) will help determine not only how severe this virus is, but how far along we are into the epidemic. If we really had hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of cases, along with several thousand more fatalities prior to testing, that would mean that the mortality rate is even lower than the 1.2% post-testing average so far. It would also mean we are farther along in the epidemic and that many have already been exposed to it, thereby making a categorical and nationwide lockdown counterintuitive at this point.

What led our government and the governments of many other countries into panic was a single Imperial College of U.K. study, funded by global warming activists, that predicted 2.2 million deaths if we didn’t lock down the country. In addition, the reported 8-9% death rate in Italy scared us into thinking there was some other mutation of this virus that they got, which might have come here. Together with the fact that we were finally testing and had the ability to actually report new cases, we thought we were headed for a death spiral. But again, as my colleague Steve Deace pointed out, we can’t flatten a curve if we don’t know when the curve started.

Take this chart from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, for example.

You see an insanely dangerous trajectory of cases taking off in March. But what exactly happened in March? The virus was introduced in Wuhan in November. And even without testing, we did detect a handful of cases here, the first known case being on January 21. So why would we suddenly experience the outbreak in March? It’s quite evident that the culprit for the spike in the chart is simply because that is when the testing began because Trump dropped the FDA regulation barring private testing after the government testing didn’t work.

Thus, we know with certainty that people were clearly contracting coronavirus and were likely dying some time before March, but we’re still not sure how long before or how many people. Given the overlap with the general flu and pneumonia season, we really have no way of knowing that the January 21 case of the individual flying from Wuhan to Spokane, Washington, was the first active case – patient zero.

It’s truly inconceivable that it would take so long for the virus to come here after it broke out in China in November. We likely had hundreds of thousands of travelers coming here and countless tens of thousands of Chinese nationals flying back even before Customs and Border Protection introduced any health care screening per CDC guidance on January 17. There are roughly 3.4 million Chinese admissions every year, not counting the numerous Americans who fly there and back. If we divide that by six to account for a two-month period before Trump shut off travel but after the virus had developed in Wuhan, that would be nearly 600,000 Chinese nationals.

It’s safe to say that as January wore on, the numbers likely dropped a lot from the Chinese side, but it’s still a statistical improbability that the virus wasn’t brought in earlier and in greater numbers than CDC has thus far detected and documented. Moreover, Chinese students in particular, including those from Wuhan, traveled back in mid-January for the new semester.

As Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of Trump’s coronavirus response task force, said yesterday of the spread in New York City, “Clearly the virus had to have been circulating for a number of weeks in order to have this level of penetrance in the community.”

If some of the pneumonia cases and deaths earlier this year were from coronavirus, that would mean that the death rate is much lower than predicted. Even the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was the ultimate petri dish of recycled air circulating an infection, with an elderly population, experienced a 1.25% fatality rate. New York, which seems to be, by far, the worst hot spot now, has a mortality rate hovering between 0.75% and 0.80%, and it is going down as they test more cases. That compares to 1.2% nationwide, which helps show that wherever we test and identify the virus, the numbers go way up, but the mortality goes down.

According to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, New York accounts for 25 percent of the nation’s testing. That means if every other state tested a larger sample of those who actually have the virus, their death rates would likely be as low as New York’s. This is what we are seeing in Germany, which tested more people than any other Western country, but has a mortality rate of 0.3%, despite having almost as large a proportion of seniors as Italy.

A mortality rate of 0.75% would still be three times higher than H1N1, which is very serious, but does it warrant a nationwide shutdown indefinitely, with governors closing school for the remainder of the year and others, like Gov. Cuomo, taking about this going on for nine months? Given the evidence in front of us on the mortality rate, the fact that so many more likely have had it or were exposed to it, and the fact that the Asian countries are already getting over the worst of it, why would we continue destroying our economy without studying more data? Why pass bankrupting legislation presupposing such a long-term shutdown? Even in Italy, the virus is showing signs of peaking after four weeks.

Shouldn’t this be the top debate item in Congress, given that the truth behind these questions will determine our needed fiscal response? Let’s face it, either way, Congress’ proposals will bankrupt us, but if our governments continue demanding indefinite lockdown, no amount of money in the world could solve this problem.

What about Italy? Why is its mortality rate so high? Some have suggested that it’s due to the high elderly population, but that doesn’t explain why the Diamond Princess had elderly mortality rates in line with the rest of the world. I don’t have the answer to that, but a plausible theory has been offered by Prof. Walter Ricciardi, scientific adviser to Italy’s minister of health, that Italy is overcounting deaths. “On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity – many had two or three,” said Ricciardi, according to the U.K. Telegraph.

Remember, Germany has just a 0.3% fatality rate, and Israel has just 1 death out of nearly 1,700 cases. Germany’s demographic is almost as old as Italy’s, while Israel’s demographic is young. Thus, other factors are at play here.

Clearly, we need answers before we destroy our way of life and our economy indefinitely. Yet these are the only answers the bipartisan cabal in Washington is uninterested in discovering.

Here’s the ultimate question they need to answer: What would be the value added for locking down all Americans rather than allowing most healthy Americans in most parts of the country to go back to work by next week with proper precautionary measures? Where is their evidence that, given the virus has already been in the country for months, further lockdown will save more lives and that the economic depression won’t cost more lives? In order to answer those questions, we need more information on how we got here.

Source: Conservative Review

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New Rules Eliminate Tulsi Gabbard From Next Democratic Presidential Debate | The Epoch Times

Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard speaks during the fourth U.S. Democratic presidential candidates 2020 election debate in Westerville, OhioJohnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: Once again the DNC changes the rules and controls the electoral process long before a national election. It’s a rigged system and let’s not blame the Russians for interfering in our elections. The DNC seems to have mastered that art.

By Zachary Stieber

The Democratic National Committee changed the qualifying criteria for presidential debates again, eliminating Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii).

The committee (DNC) said Friday that participants in the next debate must have at least 20 percent of the pledged delegates. Gabbard, 38, has earned only two delegates so far.

Under the new rules, the March 15 debate in Phoenix, Arizona, will feature Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), 78, and former Vice President Joe Biden, 77.

Gabbard is the only Democratic candidate left in the race besides the men. Gabbard would have qualified for the debate under previous rules. She has not qualified for the past five debates.

Gabbard took to Twitter Friday night after the new rules were announced, writing: “To keep me off the stage, the DNC again arbitrarily changed the debate qualifications. Previously they changed the qualifications in the OPPOSITE direction so Bloomberg could debate.”

The DNC previously removed one half of the qualifying criteria, enabling former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, 78, to make his first debates.

Bloomberg and a slew of others dropped out of the race in recent days.

The Democratic National Committee changed the qualifying criteria for presidential debates again, eliminating Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii).

The committee (DNC) said Friday that participants in the next debatemust have at least 20 percent of the pledged delegates. Gabbard, 38, has earned only two delegates so far.

Under the new rules, the March 15 debate in Phoenix, Arizona, will feature Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), 78, and former Vice President Joe Biden, 77.

Gabbard is the only Democratic candidate left in the race besides the men. Gabbard would have qualified for the debate under previous rules. She has not qualified for the past five debates.

Gabbard took to Twitter Friday night after the new rules were announced, writing: “To keep me off the stage, the DNC again arbitrarily changed the debate qualifications. Previously they changed the qualifications in the OPPOSITE direction so Bloomberg could debate.”

The DNC previously removed one half of the qualifying criteria, enabling former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, 78, to make his first debates.

Bloomberg and a slew of others dropped out of the race in recent days.

Former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, 38, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), 59, also withdrew in recent days before endorsing Biden.

Source: The Epoch Times

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DNC Superdelegates Warn They Will Block Bernie Sanders at Convention and Spark Civil War Within the Democratic Party | Yahoo & The Independent

3a9343e22e675c07b8f8b4008e5a7ec3By Greg Graziosi

Senator Bernie Sanders’ issues with the Democratic establishment may continue past the nominating races and into the Democratic National Convention, according to a new report.

If Mr Sanders arrives at the convention with any less than a majority of delegates pledged to him, he may find himself with a wave of superdelegates voting against his nomination.

The New York Times reported Thursday that in interviews with 93 superdelegates, only nine said that Mr Sanders arriving at the convention with a plurality was reason enough to support him as nominee.

In the event that Mr Sanders does only win a plurality of pledged delegates, there could be a brokered convention and subsequent fight to choose a nominee.

The Times report was “based on interviews with the 93 superdelegates, out of 771 total, as well as party strategists and aides to senior Democrats about the thinking of party leaders.”

Those leaders apparently told the Times they anticipated a fight at the July nominating convention.

“A vast majority of those superdelegates – whose ranks include federal elected officials, former presidents and vice presidents and DNC members – predicted that no candidate would clinch the nomination during the primaries, and that there would be a brokered convention fight in July to choose a nominee.”

Politico reported similar findings. In interviews with 20 superdelegates, none of them expressed explicitly endorsement of Mr Sanders’ belief that whoever gets the most pledged delegates by the convention should get the nomination.

“No, no I think the rules are set and we ought to follow the rules. Especially when someone says follow the rules who’s not even a Democrat,” Congressman Jaun Vargas said. Mr Vargas has endorsed former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg for nominee.

Thanks to a rule change limiting the powers of superdelegates – which largely came about due to criticism from Mr Sanders following the 2016 Democratic primary – they are now only allowed to vote if no candidate wins the 1,991 pledged delegates needed to reach a majority.

Congressman Anthony Brown, who has endorsed former South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg, said there is “going to be a fight no matter what the outcome is.”

Should Mr Sanders arrive at the convention with a strong plurality, any attempt by superdelegates to nominate someone else is likely to be seen by Mr Sanders’ supporters as the Democratic establishment gaming the system to nominate their preferred candidate. Such a move would likely damage the already tenuous coalition between establishment Democrats and progressive Democrats.

“It’s going to be pretty tough to take the nomination away from someone who’s got a strong plurality. If it’s neck and neck and close and everybody’s close, that’s one thing. But if there’s a clear winner, it’s hard to overturn,” Congressman John Larson said. “People can fantasize about a brokered convention but it’s going to be awfully hard to overturn the will of the people.”

Source: The Independent

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James Woods Gives Interesting Prediction for Who Will Win the 2020 Dem Primary | Trending Politics

5e3f0f6bcbc90james-woodsJohnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: Watching the Democratic candidates wrestle with each other at the numerous debates we’ve come to the conclusion that none of them are qualified to be President. Also we often thought, as James Woods does, that Hillary is still orchestrating the Democratic Party behind the scenes and might just jump into the fray to “save the day” at the Convention. 

Conservative actor James Woods is back on Twitter and has a lot to say. Woods took a break from the social media platform after he was suspended multiple times by the liberal leaders at Twitter.

On Friday, Woods gave an interesting theory for who he thinks will win the Democratic primary race.

“Just for giggles, imagine this: the #IowaCauscuses were not a snafu, but an engineered ‘cluster muck’ to keep the #Democrat field wide open. The #ImpeachmentSham was a way to air Biden’s corruption. The chaos leads to a brokered convention. Guess which drunken hag saves the day?” Woods tweeted.

According to Woods, Hillary Clinton will swoop in and win the election.

“The #Clintons are like nuclear cockroaches. They can survive anything. Remember you read it here: #HillaryClinton has a solid chance at being the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee in a brokered convention. She’s the Terminator of American politics,” Woods tweeted.

Iowa was a disaster to say the least. So much so that the Associated Press couldn’t even declare a winner. “There is evidence the party has not accurately tabulated some of its results, including those released late Thursday that the party reported as complete. The AP’s tabulation of the party’s results are at 99% of precincts reporting, with data missing from one of 1,765 precincts, among other issues,” they reported.

Check out what the Daily Wire reported:

The results as they stand now show a virtual tie between former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pett Buttigieg and Vermont Democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, 26.2% to 26.1%. Sen. Elizabeth Warren came in third at 18% and former vice president Joe Biden fourth at 15.8%.

Woods’ theory — that Iowa was no accident and intended to keep the field “wide open” — has been voiced by others, especially Sanders’ supporters. They think the entire process is slanted against their candidate, who got aced out of the 2016 nomination by a biased system set up to ensure a Clinton win.

And on Biden, it’s not the first time speculation has swirled that the whole Ukraine-impeachment fiasco was really intended to take out Biden, not President Trump.

After the smoke cleared about Trump’s July 25 phone call to the Ukrainian president asking for a “favor,” it emerged that Biden’s son Hunter made hundreds of thousands of dollars through his employment with Burisma, the largest private gas company in Ukraine — despite having no known qualifications for the job. And when word spread that a prosecutor was looking into the matter, Biden demanded that the prosecutor be fired.

Biden is on tape discussing his push for the Ukrainian government to fire Viktor Shokin, bragging he had threatened to withhold $1 billion until Shokin was canned. “If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,” he says he told Ukrainian leaders. “Well son of a bitch, he got fired,” Biden says with a smile in the video clip.

Even though Team Trump and GOP lawmakers never called Biden or his son to testify in the Senate trial, their shady business dealings were front and center. And while Trump’s approval rating went up over the course of the trial, Biden’s plummeted, leading to his dismal fourth-place finish in Iowa.

What’s more, Woods’ theory about a brokered convention could well play out. Even though Clinton is not even in the race, there’s no clear front runner and few in the party are jazzed about their choices. Along the path to the nomination, delegates are distributed proportionally, meaning a candidate who wins 14% of the vote gets 14% of the delegates, and so on. With eight candidates still in the race, it may come down to no candidate winning a majority of the delegates, which means no one would be picked until the Democratic National Committee’s convention in July.

So Woods just might really be on to something here.

Source: Trending Politics

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The Game is Rigged | Counterpunch

32917978597_d9f4330dd6_cJohnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: We publish controversial articles to inspire critical thinking. This is written from an eco-marxist perspective and is a cogent analysis of the Democratic Party and power structures in general. We do not agree with their analysis of Trump, the Republican Party or the impeachment trial.

By Paul Street

Let’s not beat around the bush. The game is rigged. The fix is in.

I’m not just talking about Donald Trump, the Republican Party, the Republican-controlled United States Senate and the fake-impeachment trial that body just concluded. I’m talking about their neoliberal enablers, the Democrats too.

Certain Depressing Things Explained

The deeply conservative corporate and imperialist Democratic Party politics and media complex is determined to deny the progressive neo-New Deal Democrat Bernie Sanders the presidential nomination.

So what if Sanders is the Democratic presidential candidate most likely to organize the working- and lower-class the corporate Democrats – the nation’s Inauthentic Opposition Party of Fake Resistance (IOPFR)– have been betraying demobilizing for decades?

So what if this makes Sanders the most electable candidate against an incumbent president and a party that pose existential fascistic and ecocidal threats to what’s left of democracy, the republic, and life itself?

So what if Sanders’ key policy proposals, including Single Payer health insurance (health care as a human right) and a Green New Deal (to put millions to work trying to roll back the soulless capitalist destruction of livable ecology) are urgently required for the common good and human survival?

So what if Sanders’ proposals are conservative in relation to the savage scale of the inequality and environmental destruction neoliberal class rule has been inflicting for several decades on Americans and livable ecology?

So what if nearly half (47%) of Sanders supporters will not commit to voting for the Democratic presidential candidate in November if it isn’t Bernie, making it likely that any other candidate is likely to usher in the tragedy of a second Trump term?

The Democratic establishment is determined to stop Sanders at all costs. As I’ve been saying for years, the corporate Democrats prefer to lose to the ever more viciously right-wing Republicans and the demented fascist oligarch Trump than to the moderately left wing of their own party.

This is why the establishment Democrats and their many media allies (at the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico, The Hill, CNN, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, and elsewhere) have issued repeated dire warnings over the supposed “radical Leftism” and “extremism” of the mildly social-democratic Sanders.

It’s why Democratic Party-affiliated funders and media opened the campaign season by touting the clownish center-right dementia victim Joe Biden as their “front-runner.”

It’s why those funders and media shifted to the slimy Wall Street plaything Pete Butiggieg after Biden re-exposed himself and pseudo-liberal Kamala Harris proved unable to stand strong in the “pragmatic” center-right Clinton-Obama-Tony Blair-Emanuel Macron lane.

It’s why the establishment “liberal” media harps constantly on Sanders’ supposed un-electability even as polls show him solidly beating Trump.

It’s why former Barack Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, former global derivatives trader and right-wing MSDNC (I mean MSNBC) host Stephanie (class-) Ruhle, and the noxious neoconservative pundit Bill Kristol recently joined forces on MSNBC to viciously denounce Sanders as “the worst candidate” to run against Trump.

It’s why the Democratic National Committee is working to reinstate the authoritarian veto power of unelected establishment “superdelegates” on the first ballot of the Democratic National Convention – a move clearly driven by establishment fears that Sanders could accumulate enough delegates to sweep to a first ballot victory under current rules.

It’s the reason for the Elizabeth Warren-CNN hit job in the last Iowa Democratic presidential debate – the one where Warren and the cable network conspired to falsely smear Sanders as a sexist.

It’s why MSNBC and CNN went into overdrive trying to portray Sanders’ campaign as “divisive” after Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib responded to Hillary Clinton’s malicious personal attacks on Sanders with an ill-timed reaction MSNBC blew up into “the boo heard around the world.”

It’s why MSNBC and CNN have played along with Hillary Clinton’s despicable and false claim thar Sanders didn’t work hard to help Mrs. Clinton’s (horrific and depressing) campaign during the 2016 general election.

It’s why the Democratic Party has changed its presidential debate qualification rules so that mega-billionaire and center-right Republocrat Mike Bloomberg can ascend to the top candidate stage on a magic carpet of money after skipping the campaign process in the early caucus and primary states.

It’s why the insufferable MSNBC bully Chris Matthews (the Ted Baxter of cable news) lost what little composure he has when Sanders’ campaign co-chair Nina Turner accurately called Bloomberg “an oligarch” (more on this amusing and revealing episode below).

It’s why the New York Times has been running deceptive commentaries warning falsely about the supposed “radical extremism,” “fiscal irresponsibility,” “rudeness” and “nonviability” of Sanders and his backers.

It’s why the California Democratic Party’s centrist managers are doing their best to make it difficult for independents to vote for Sanders, the state’s leading presidential candidate.

It’s probably why the Des Moines Register Star (which endorsed Elizabeth “Capitalist in my Bones” Warren) strangely decided not to release its usual “gold standard” Iowa poll of the state’s first-in-the-national caucus-goers prior to the big (and shockingly wrecked) event last Monday.

It’s why the Times, CNN, and MSNBC (the last outfit is broadcast media’s ground-zero for fake-progressive Wall Street centrism ) tout Butiggieg as the winner of Iowa’s spoiled caucus even though Sanders won the same number of state delegates and triumphed decisively in the popular vote (please see and disseminate Fairness and Accuracy in Media’s reflection on “How Corporate Media Makes Pete Look Like He’s Winning”).

It’s why CNN anchors smirkingly opine that Sanders “under-performed” and “failed to meet expectations” even after he won the Caucus.

Iowa Black-Apped

And it’s likely why the Iowa Caucus got app-f*#^ed, with the contest’s results rendered unavailable to the public for days. The deadly Shadow app’s “failure” and the mind-boggling dysfunction and confusion of the error-ridden count that followed (so extreme that we’ll probably never know the real numbers) robbed Sanders of a momentum-building election night victory speech – and gave Trump another reason to gloat about the pathetic nature of the Democratic Party.

It turns out that the Shadow app that crashed the Iowa Caucus and threw Sanders’ Iowa victory down the media memory hole was less than politically neutral. Hardly known for leftist conspiracy theorizing, USA Today offered some chilling reflections the morning after:

‘What’s this about Shadow and where did the app come from? The app was created by a company called Shadow Inc., and issued by Jimmy Hickey of Shadow Inc., metadata of the program that the Des Moines Register analyzed Tuesday shows. A LinkedIn profile for James Hickey lists him as COO of Shadow and an engineering manager for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Two other former Clinton campaign workers, former Gerard Niemira and Krista Davis, co-founded Shadow…The New York Times has reported that ACRONYM – a Democratic nonprofit founded in 2017 “to educate, inspire, register, and mobilize voters,” according to its website – supported Shadow. Its founder and CEO is Tara McGowan, a former journalist and digital producer with President Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, The Los Angeles Times reported….Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price, who also worked as Clinton’s 2016 Iowa political director, did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday about the relationship between the party and Shadow, which it paid $63,184 for website development and travel expenses…’

It gets worse. According to the Los Angeles Times, in an article titled “Tech Firm Started by Clinton Campaign Veterans Linked to Iowa Caucus Debacle”: “Among Shadow’s clients is Pete Buttegieg’s presidential campaign, which paid $42,500 to the firm in July 2019 for ‘software rights and subscriptions,’ according to disclosures to the FEC.”

So, Shadow, Inc. got money from Wall Street Pete (from the financial sector via Butiggieg, that is), a former consultant with the infamously dark and globalist McKinsey Company and a onetime U.S. Navy Intelligence Officer.

Further feeding the sense of the Iowa Caucus Debacle as a CIA/military intelligence Black Op, Butiggieg proclaimed himself the Iowa victor with zero precincts reporting last Monday night! How Juan Guaido was that?

It worked. The fact that Sanders won Iowa was turned into a public non-fact. The confusion bought Mayor Pete a couple of days to take some undeserved victory laps across the “liberal” media, boosting him in New Hampshire.

The Democrats Did “More to Undermine Faith in Our Elections than Russia Ever Could”

No talking head has captured the evil of it all more effectively and bitingly than The Hill’s Krystal Ball yesterday morning. Her comments merit transcription and lengthy quotation:

“Let [this sink in]: Twitter is doing a better, more accurate job of tabulating the results than the Democratic Party. What else might be wrong through incompetence, malice, or a combination of both, God only knows. But as if that’s not enough, after Pete claimed a fake victory thanks to the complicity of the Iowa Democratic Party and the media, it turns out that, surprise, surprise, they saved the best precincts for Bernie Sanders to be counted and included last, because of course they did. I’m sure it was all just a coincidence, though, guys. And meanwhile, a new tracking poll shows that Pete’s fake win in Iowa has given him a big boost in New Hampshire, lifting him 9 points in 3 days.”

“What is truly criminal to me, though, is this: the people who gave Bernie Sanders this hard-fought and well-deserved win are people like this: immigrant workers at a pork-processing plant, who had to fight to even be able to cast their ballots in a caucus that conflicted with their work schedule. They were the very first to vote and among the last to be counted. For four days, their voice and their vote were completely erased, as were the Latinos who participated in satellite caucuses and went overwhelmingly for Bernie Sanders. It is absolutely outrageous.”

“Do you remember the endless, three-year rant at RussiaGate and over how a foreign power spending a million or two over a month on lousy, ungrammatical Facebook ads inside a billion dollar election was the biggest threat to our constitutional republic and was material to Hillary’s loss in 2016? Let’s be completely clear here. The Democratic Party in Iowa has done more to undermine faith in our elections than Russia ever could. Period. But don’t expect a Democratic House to hold months-long hearings into the Iowa Caucus debacle. Don’t expect any degree of self-reflection on the part of the party bosses and consultant grifters who deserve to be fired en masse. Instead, the same folks who think they should be able to take the nomination from Bernie with their Superdelegates, the same folks who tweak the process so it suits them, the same folks who are now leaking out partial wrong results in a mockery of manipulation masquerading as transparency…these people will continue to run the Democratic Party in Iowa and elsewhere until and unless an anti-establishment candidate like Bernie throws them all out. ….”

“… Single moms arranged babysitters to participate in this caucus. Nurses gave up shifts, lost 12 hours of pay to participate in this caucus. People rolled in with their wheelchairs. They weren’t with their kids or doing their college homework…Volunteers donated hundreds of thousands of hours of time. Banging on doors, hosting house parties, managing selfie lines, and all for what? So that all that time, all that energy could be turned into a giant joke that makes everyone who participated in the process feel like a fool….”

“People that we invite into this process are made a sacred promise that this activity s meaningful and necessary. And then to watch such manifest incompetence, cronyism, obfuscation, and selective disclosure in what is supposed to be the most critical election of our lifetime makes a joke out of democracy and spread cynicism like the Coranavirus of the civic soul…This whole democracy looks like a Potemkin Village farce where the GOP and Democratic Party insiders seem to almost laugh at the rubes who take this whole thing as serious and sacred.”

I’ve never had the same degree of faith n U.S. electoral politics that Ms. Ball (who would likely and wrongly consider me a victim and purveyor of cynicism) seems to have had in the past, but that is an extremely powerful denunciation of what happened to Sanders and his backers – and the democratic ideal – in Iowa this week.

(At least we know for certain that voters are ready to pull the rusty chain on Joe Pool Chain Biden. Too bad for the companies who were gearing up to mass produce record players for the poor in response to Joe “Record Players for the Poor” Biden’s promise of Vinyl New Deal.)

This is Who the Democrats Are

Butiggieg knows he’s never going to be president. “Alfred E. Neuman’s” role is to muddle public perceptions, screwing Warren and Sanders in the early states to help set up “Mini-Mike” Bloomberg (I am borrowing Trump’s frankly clever nicknames for these right-wing candidate), who is Wall Street’s next Great Stop Sanders Hope in the wake of “Sleepy Joe’s” predictable (and widely predicted) collapse.

MSNBC is cable news central for the IOPFR’s Campaign to Stop Sanders and Re-Elect the Neofascist Trump with Yet Another Centrist Neoliberal Creep. Two days ago, the network’s “Morning Joe” hosts used the very Iowa fiasco that their on-the-ground ideological comrades created to promote Bloomberg and Super Tuesday as the alternatives to “radical” Bernie and the early caucus and primaries. The “progressive” Kissingerian network (I’ve heard MSNBC hosts praise the blood-drenched war criminal Henry Kissinger on numerous occasions) didn’t try hide its corporatist agenda to any serious degree.

“Democrats,” a popular Internet meme featuring pictures of Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi runs, “are afraid that American voters are going to interfere in the 2020 election.”

Thank you. Exactly right.

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. The Democratic Party isn’t about social justice, democracy, and/or environmental sanity. It isn’t even primarily about winning elections. “History’s second most enthusiastic capitalist party” (as former Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips once accurately described the Democrats) is about serving “elite” corporate and financial sponsors above all, and those sponsors prefer a second fascistic Trump term to a mildly progressive first Sanders one.

Oligarchs “Take Advantage of a Broken and Dysfunctional System”

In an amusing and telling episode on MSNBC prior to the Caucus, Nina Turner told Chris Matthews that voters worry about “the oligarchs” who buy American elections. “Do you think Mike Bloomberg is an oligarch?!” an outraged Matthews asked. “He is,” Turner retorted. “He skipped Iowa. Iowans should be insulted. Buying his way into this race, period. The DNC changed the rules. They didn’t change it for Senator Harris. They didn’t change it for Senator Booker. They didn’t change it for Secretary Castro.”

Thank you. Exactly right.

Matthews then incredulously asked Turner is she really believed Bloomberg purchased his way into the presidential debates – as if there is the slightest hint of a scintilla of an iota of a sliver of a wisp of a rumor of a scent of doubt about.

After Matthews finished idiotically interrogating Turner, MSNBC anchor Brian Williams turned to MSNBC pundit Jason Johnson. Johnson also disapproved of Ms. Turner’s description of the oligarch Bloomberg as an oligarch.

“Oligarchy, in our particular terminology,” Johnson intoned, “makes you think of a rich person who got their money off of oil in Russia, who is taking advantage of a broken and dysfunctional system.”

You can’t make shit like that up! No, Jason Johnson: imperialist, Russophobic, and American Exceptionalist doctrine and bad reporting make you think that way. Merriam-Webster defines “oligarchy” as: “government by the few; a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.” There’s an abundance of solid academic research showing that the United States today fits the definition very well. Here are four for Johnson to start with: Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What we Can Do About It (University of Chicago, 2018), Ron Formisano, American Oligarchy: The Permanent Political Class (University of Illinois, 2017); Jeffrey Winters, Oligarchy (Cambridge University Press, 2011, with the United States as a leading case study); Paul Street, They Rule: They 1% v. Democracy (Routledge, 2014).

Concerned about rich people “taking advantage of a broken and dysfunctional system”? Look no further than the world’s self-proclaimed “greatest democracy”! No other “democracy” in the so-called developed world remotely matches the United States of Dark Money when it comes to giving big donors unregulated power in their national electoral processes. Along with other and related characteristics of its election and party system — winner-take-all contests with no proportional representation, rampant partisan gerrymandering of election districts, voter registration problems, corporate media bias and the “federalist” decentralization and partisan control of U.S. election process — this plutocratic campaign finance free-for-all is why the Electoral Integrity Project (a research undertaking funded by the Australian Research Council with a team of researchers based at the University of Sydney and Harvard University) ranks the democratic election integrity of U.S. elections below that of all 19 North and Western European democracies and also below that of 10 other nations in the Americas (Costa Rica, Uruguay, Canada, Chile, Brazil, Jamaica, Grenada, Argentina, Barbados and Peru), 10 nations in Central and Eastern Europe, 9 Asian-Pacific countries, 2 countries in the Middle East (Israel and Tunisia) and 6 African nations. The U.S. ranks dead last among “Western democracies.”

Don’t take it from a radical eco-Marxist like me. As the distinguished liberal political scientists Page (Northwestern) and Gilens (Princeton) showed in their expertly researched 2017 book mentioned above:

“the best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans actually have had little or no impact on the making of federal government policy.  Wealthy individuals and organized interest groups – especially business corporations – have had much more political clout.  When they are taken into account, it becomes apparent that the general public has been virtually powerless… Majorities of Americans favor…programs to help provide jobs, increase wages, help the unemployed, provide universal medical insurance, ensure decent retirement pensions, and pay for such programs with progressive taxes.  Most Americans also want to cut ‘corporate welfare.’ Yet the wealthy, business groups, and structural gridlock have mostly blocked such new policies [and programs] (emphasis added).”

The Table is Tilted: Beyond the Cynical Brilliance of George Carlin

It was nice of the professors to quantify and document what working-class Americans have always known: money talks, bullshit walks. My old Finish socialist Aunt Mary (a high school graduate who worked for decades as a department store clerk in downtown Elgin, Illinois) understood Page and Gilens’ point very well. In the famous words of George Carlin:

“There’s a reason education sucks and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got. Because the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the REAL owners, now. The real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions — forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations; they’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State houses, the City Halls; they’ve got the judges in their back pockets, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear.”

“They gotcha by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying — lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want — they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that, that doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting f***ed by the system that threw them overboard 30 f***ing years ago. They don’t want that.”

“You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. …All day long, beating you over the in their media telling you what to believe — what to think — and what to buy. The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care.”

“…They don’t give a fuck about you, they don’t…They don’t care about you – at all. At all, At all. At all. At all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care … that’s what the owners count on, the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue d**k that’s being jammed up their assholes every day. Because the owners of this country know the truth — it’s called the American Dream … ‘cuz you have to be asleep to believe it.”

The problem with Carlin’s brilliant rant is of course it’s extreme, well, cynicism. Millions upon millions of Americans do notice and do care. They aren’t asleep. They are capable of critical thinking. They very much want to un-rig the game, level the table, and change the system – make a people’s democratic revolution and save humanity. I run into and talk to and try to energize and learn and get energy from these people regularly. They haven’t surrendered to the American authoritarian-sexist-racist-nativist-nationalist-fascist nightmare yet.

I share with many of these people a basic underlying spiritual sense that giving up and letting the owners – our financial and political owners, yes – win is irrational and indeed morally corrupt. Let’s say the chances of collapsing the nation’s un-elected and interrelated dictatorships of money, empire, white-supremacism, and patriarchy are just 3 or 2 or even 1 in 10 (I think the real odds may be much higher). Why bring them down to zero by giving in to fatalism – to “it’s never going to change?” It makes no sense to give up: you lose nothing by believing in the possibility of democratic transformation and revolutionary change; you lose everything by not believing. Try some radical existentialism!

Tactical Support

Should people caucus and vote for Bernie in the rigged Democratic Party nomination process? Sure, for three reasons. First, there’s a(n admittedly slim) chance Sanders could prevail and lead the enactment of changes that would make a very positive difference in peoples’ lives and capacity to fight back against American Oligarchy, which is now taking significant steps towards openly authoritarian rule.

Second, doing some work with the Sanders campaign puts you in contact with masses of people who are changing all the time (like all phenomena), people-in-process who are capable of engaging on the critical topics of how and why we must move beyond the rigged games and systems that capture and depress our energies and how and why we must begin to organize for a real revolution.

Third, even if he doesn’t win, it’s good to make the screwing over of Sanders as transparent and instructive as possible. This could help motivate millions of Americans to break in revolutionary fashion from a “broken and dysfunctional [American] system” of class rule. It could help spark millions to join a people’s movement that works beneath and beyond the rigged elections cycle and system to heroically reclaim the commons and save humanity.

There’s a lot of good and potentially radical energy out there. It needs to go somewhere positive once the “coffin of class consciousness” (in the words of the radical historian Alan Dawley) that is the American ballot box fails to deliver yes…yet once again. The capitalists hardly restrict their political pressure to the electoral process – just wait to see what happens if Sanders (somewhat miraculously) makes it into the White House. We must and can develop an anti-capitalist (and now anti-fascist) politics that fights back in ways that transcend those savagely time-staggered moments when our owners permit us to make marks next to the names of politicians who can generally be trusted to put their own interests above ours and those of the common good.

“Except for the rare few,” Howard Zinn once wrote, “our representatives are politicians, and will surrender their integrity, claiming to be ‘realistic.’ We are not politicians, but citizens. We have no office to hold on to, only our consciences, which insist on telling the truth.”

Source: Counterpunch

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Term limits will drain the swamp and stop career politicians | The Washington Times

CapitalClockBy Conner Drigotas

One of the ironies of the impeachment of President Trump is just how similar the cast of characters is to those in the impeachment of Bill Clinton. By the time the trial was over, Nancy Pelosi, Jerry Nadler, Maxine Waters, Lindsay Graham, and 80 other members of Congress had cast a vote. And what is obvious is that the same players have been acting out for decades. When will things change?

Let’s face the facts: Washington politicians and bureaucrats arrive in the swamp and become entrenched. The longest-serving members of Congress have served for more than 45 years, and there are 44 congressional districts in which the age of the representative is more than double the median age of their constituents.

Incumbents, of course, have a defined advantage in this: In 2016, 97 percent of representatives were reelected. So if Americans want solutions at the highest levels of government, we should be demanding fresh leadership on a regular basis: Politicians and government officials should be subject to a short tenure before returning to civilian life through term limits.

Modern problems demand modern solutions. Aging seniors grilling tech gurus about privacy, emerging technologies and consumer rights have become a national joke. More concerning, tech illiteracy is yielding bad legislation that puts American security at risk.

Yet, the only thing the opposition party can offer judging by the Democratic presidential candidate lineup is more of the same, with candidates claiming long careers contributing to the swamp. Elizabeth Warren is in her eighth year in Washington, and she’s competing for the Oval Office against Bernie Sanders, who’s been an elected official since 1981.

Both are looking to extend their stay in Washington, whether as president or through a continued Senate tenure. Joe Biden, another candidate, first took public office 50 years ago, in 1970. Fresh names and fresh ideas, on both the right, with Donald Trump, and the left, with Pete Buttigieg, have already won the first caucus of 2020. Americans are clearly hungry for something new.

Term limits could be one viable measure to prevent career politicians. It’s an idea that has been promoted by Mr. Trump with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The struggle, of course, lies in the fact that members of Congresswould have to be willing to vote themselves out of a job.

Removing career politicians, regardless of their success or good will, ensures that the job is in the service of the people rather than in pursuit of greater net worth. But term limits would only solve a part of the problem. Beyond elected officials, there are more than 2.1 million federal employees propping up the status quo.

The vast web of bureaucrats who staff the federal government’s many administrative branches have an even longer tenure than Congress. The most tenured Washington bureaucrat has been working for the government since 1942. No matter how perfect a civil servant’s record on the job, longevity itself must be addressed.The administrative state enables bureaucrats to write rules, direct policy and impact the lives of everyday Americans. Yet, voters can’t vote this vast workforce out of office. Federal employees are difficult to remove, and often the will to remove them isn’t there. A 2013 study by the office for governmental accountability found that only 0.18 percent of employees were terminated in 2013, roughly 10 percent the rate of the private sector.

Mr. Trump has often pledged to “drain the swamp,” but he has yet to follow through on that campaign promise. The number of federal employees has remained relatively consistent since the 1950s and held steady through the Trump presidency. Federal tenure rules make it increasingly difficult to remove low performers. It doesn’t seem to matter who’s in office, or from what party — these career bureaucrats continue to exert power.This unchecked control is especially troubling when it involves sensitive information concerning national security. In 2017, officials with anonymity confessed that intelligence agencies routinely withheld information from the commander-in-chief, asserting authority as independent actors not beholden to elected officials or the American people.

That some longtime politicians and bureaucrats may be acting in the best interests of the people doesn’t negate the larger point: Those who contribute to the swamp far outnumber honest civil servants. Simply put, governance should not be a career; it should be temporary and in service to the public. Short tenures are the way to do just that, since they’ve historically served to keep the size of government power in check.

Whoever wins in November, though, is unlikely to make a difference in that regard. For Congress and the Washington Machine, history has shown that the White House won’t impact business as usual.

But things need to change — from term limits to an end to federal tenure. Abbreviated careers in government would ensure the will of the people informs the highest levels of government.

Let’s show swamp dwellers the door.

• Conner Drigotas is the director of communications at a national law firm and a Young Voices contributor.

Source: Washington Times

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Tucker Carlson: The New Way Forward Act | YouTube

Sponsored by 44 House Democrats insuring that criminals can move to the USA with impunity at U.S. taxpayer expense. This is the most horrendous piece of legislation ever proposed by the radical left/liberal cabal in the House of Representatives. This is  treason and should be reckoned with. None or these sponsors have any business staying in the U.S. Congress for one more term. 

Source: YouTube